Once again, the search for the Higgs boson heats up again, as scientists prepare to announce tomorrow, July 4, 2012, their latest findings.
Yesterday on Twitter, there was plenty of buzz about the Higgs boson, as it trended well into the evening and night. The latest news is that there's compelling evidence that suggests the LHC has narrowed down its search for the Higgs boson, making its existence highly probable.
Some of you might remember my commenting on this last year, when the French-Swiss based LHC and the US based Tevatron collider showed positive (though shaky) signs of the Higgs' existence. In an article published Tuesday 13 December 2011 16.06 GMT by the Guardian, titled We may have glimpsed the Higgs boson, say Cern scientists, the folks there spoke of having narrowed down the region where the Higgs might be found, in a way "catching a glimpse" of the the particle. (I should note that there's two detectors at the LHC working on the Higgs search. One is the Alice experiment, and the other CMS.) At that time, the data they collected included a spike in each experimental measurement having a respective probability of 2.3 and 1.9 sigma. (1 ranking as statistical anomaly, 5 ranking as "discovery". Simply, the higher the better.) While those numbers weren't exactly great, both hovering slightly above "fluke", having both detectors show something is noteworthy. It might not have been a fluke, and may have been the first sign of something actually being there. In any case, they were hesitant at the time and waited for more data. Fast forward to today.
On July 3, 2012, Reuters published an article titled Best evidence yet found for "God particle:" U.S. physicists . In it, the US based Tevatron accelerator (which is now shut-down due to budget cuts) claims to have gathered more convincing evidence that those earlier tests were on the right track. However, they only, in a way, showed the way toward where the Higgs could be found (in nerd speak, around the 125 GeV range). This is were the LHC comes into the picture, once again, since they're still operating. Not only are they operating, they're also using higher-power than the Tevatron collider could produce. With more power, comes more range to search for signs of the Higgs. And they might have found something Higgs-like, which is what the all the latest buzz is about.
So, tomorrow, Cern is expected hold a news conference to get everyone up to date on what their currently collected data shows. Has the Higgs boson been found? Twitter hype has already declared it exists, so it must be! A Wired article published July 2, 2012, titled How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics suggests it could even be an underwhelming event as its implications gradually become clearer in the future. Personally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if physics were to "break". Galileo broke the astronomical theory of his time, and now we've got a better know-how to navigate and map the solar system. In a way, current particle physics is already fragmented, which is why physicists are trying to find the Higgs boson (doing so would help shore-up the Standard Model in particle physics).
Nevertheless, if the latest LHC tests do confirm signs of the Higgs boson, it'll be interesting times for particle physics.
